It was hard work to find any news articles that mentioned the exchanges about Benghazi, her private, unsecure e-mail server and alleged peddling of Secretary of State influence for foreign donations, through the Clinton foundation,

Regarding Benghazi, the Washington Free Beacon noted that Clinton called one of the gold star moms a liar, for contradicting Clinton’s story that the terrorist attack was caused by a YouTube video:

With Benghazi playing a major theme in the attacks against Clinton, Wallace played a video clip from the Republican National Convention (RNC) of Pat Smith blaming Clinton for her son’s death.

Wallace asked Clinton about Smith’s comments that Clinton lied to her and the other families on the day when the Benghazi victims’ bodies returned to the United States.

“I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said,” Clinton said.

Wallace played the video of Clinton blaming the attack on YouTube video. She’s not just calling the gold star mom a liar, she’s calling the video of her blaming the video a liar, too.

Breitbart News reported on the questions Wallace asked about the Clinton Foundation:

Wallace, in an exclusive sit-down interview, asked Clinton about allegations first made in Clinton Cash, the book and now film/graphic novel, that Clinton used the multi-billion-dollar charity for international “pay-to-play” deals while she served as Secretary of State. Author and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer says that Clinton Foundation donors were on the receiving end of corrupt deals approved by Hillary’s State Department — including the sale of U.S. uranium to Russia and a rare, lucrative mining permit in Haiti.

Clinton retorted that she is “really proud of the Clinton Foundation,” yet not a single speaker at the DNC last week — not even Bill or Chelsea Clinton — mentioned the Foundation or its spinoffs such as the Clinton Global Initiative.

[…]This week, news broke that the IRS is investigating the Clinton Foundation. Earlier this month, FBI Director James Comey would not confirm or deny whether the bureau is investigating the Foundation during congressional testimony. Just days later, The Globe and Mail reported that “The Canadian affiliate of the Clinton Foundation is spending an astounding 78 percent of the money it raises on administrative costs.”

And finally, she got a Four Pinnochios rating from the far-left Washington Post for her comments about her private, unsecure e-mail server – which she used to prevent her employer from reading her e-mails when she was Secretary of State:

The Facts

“Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.”
—Hillary Clinton, interview on “Fox News Sunday,” July 31, 2016

Clinton made these remarks after “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace played a video of her saying: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials. I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time. I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified.”

As Wallace put it, “After a long investigation, FBI Director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.”

After Clinton denied that, Wallace played another video of an exchange between Comey and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails either sent or received. Was that true?
COMEY: That’s not true.
GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Was that true?
COMEY: There was classified material emailed.
So what’s going on here?

The Facts

Clinton is cherry-picking statements by Comey to preserve her narrative about the unusual setup of a private email server. This allows her to skate past the more disturbing findings of the FBI investigation

[…]The Pinocchio Test

As we have seen repeatedly in Clinton’s explanations of the email controversy,she relies on excessively technical and legalistic answers to explain her actions. While Comey did say there was no evidence she lied to the FBI, that is not the same as saying she told the truth to the American public — which was the point of Wallace’s question. Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.

And although Comey did say many emails were retroactively classified, he also said that there were some emails that were already classified that should not have been sent on an unclassified, private server. That’s the uncomfortable truth that Clinton has trouble admitting.

I went to see the movie 13 hours on Saturday and found that it dovetailed nicely with all the stories that I had written on this blog about the events in Libya and the subsequent lies and cover-up by the Obama administration.

I was asked to review the movie and post all of the links to the previous stories by my friends Kevin and McKenzie, so that’s what I’m going to do.

So, I am a huge war movie fan, and I read military biography and military history. The most frustrating thing in war movies and books about war is that the go too far down to the level of details, without providing the context. Very frustrating. I don’t want movies to be too much about action and fancy animations. I want to learn something about the strategy and tactics in play. And 13 Hours does not disappoint.

You get a lot of exposure to the real world of espionage, black ops and drones for one thing. They show you the insides of a real CIA station in Libya, tell how it was acquired, and they show what goes on there. You also get to see what diplomats do, and who is responsible for keeping them safe. The battle scenes feature a ton of top down / map-like shots. There are shots of maps with the buildings and who will be deployed where, and for what reason.

Everything is called by its real name, e.g. – a technical is not called “a pickup truck with a heavy weapon”, it’s called a “technical”. An AC-130 gunship is not “air support” it’s an AC-130 gunship. A Predator drone is not a drone, it’s a Predator. An F-16 is not a “fighter jet” it’s an F-16. A QRF is not a “Quick Reaction Force”, it’s a QRF. Too bad for you if you don’t read enough to know what these things are and how they work. Everyone should be interested in these things, because these things matter for national security and foreign policy.

And the actual scenes of shooting is not mindless gunplay like in “Inception” or “The Matrix” – they try to show you the ranges, the cover, the concealment, the lines of sight, suppression, etc. There is realistic confusion about fog of war (FOW) and identifaction: friend of foe (IFF). The fact that this is a true story where the people involved all collaborated on the book and on the movie makes it really something if you like realism. This is how State Department and CIA work in other countries really goes down. If you liked “Act of Valor”, “American Sniper”, “Blackhawk Down”, “Lone Survivor” or the battle scenes in “Rules of Engagement”, then you need to see this movie.

Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

What difference at this point does it make?

All right, now the politics was kept to a minimum in the movie, but I was asked to list out all the posts that I wrote about this.

The list of posts goes back in time from October 22, 2015 to September 13th, 2012 (the day after the terrorist attack):

To make a long story short, the Benghazi terrorist attack occurred two months before the 2012 re-election of Barack Obama. And that’s why Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice lied to the American people about it – they did not want the American people to know how poorly their Libya intervention had worked out. An intervention that was strongly supported by easily-influenced moderate, establishment Republicans such as Marco Rubio, by the way. Everyone who voted for the Obama administration in the 2012 elections voted against the 4 Americans who were killed in that terrorist attack. As Secretary of State, Clinton did not prioritize national security. Her focus was on promoting abortion and gay rights abroad.

Searching by tag name

If you want to search the blog by tag, just add tag/<tagName> to the end of the web page address (URL). The list above was generated with: “https://winteryknight.com/tag/Benghazi“. Use a dash for spaces in the tagName. For my other series of posts about Democrat scandals, such as Fast and Furious, just change the tag name: “https://winteryknight.com/tag/Fast-and-Furious“. You can do the same thing with the e-mail scandal, the Clinton Foundation scandal, and all the other scandals of this corrupt Democrat administration.

I listened to an episode of of the Weekly Standard podcast featuring Stephen Hayes. No one has done more and better reporting on Benghazi than Stephen Hayes, and I’ve featured his work on it on this blog. I wanted to see what he thought of the movie. He loved it, and said it was accurate to the way it was reported by the Weekly Standard and elsewhere.

I looked at 3 reviews, and chose this one from the leftist Seattle Times to quote here.

Excerpt:

Friend? Or foe?

Those are the critical questions bedeviling the six main characters in “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.”

Strangers in a strange land, unable to speak or understand Arabic, assigned to provide security at a secret CIA installation in the restive Libyan city of the title — for them, those questions have life and death implications when the nearby ambassadorial compound is overrun by jihadist attackers on the night of Sept. 11, 2012. The assault claims the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

In Michael Bay’s gripping dramatization of that controversial event, the men, highly trained American private security operatives, can’t be sure if the figures they see moving toward them in the dark are jihadists or friendly Libyan militia members who are supposed to be the main protectors of the compound. The loyalty of those supposed allies is also questionable. It’s only when the shooting starts that the questions are answered, and then the six are in for the fight of their lives.

The picture is reminiscent of “Black Hawk Down” and “American Sniper” in the way it marries visceral Hollywood-style filmmaking (a Bay trademark) with sober subject matter in a manner that doesn’t trivialize the seriousness of the story it’s telling.

Based on Mitchell Zuckoff’s 2014 best-seller “13 Hours,” Bay’s movie is a ground-level depiction of heroism in the midst of the fog of war. Hewing closely to Zuckoff’s true-life account, Bay seems to have no political ax to grind, at least with respect to the role in the fiasco of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose name is never mentioned.

I have heard the actual operators interviewed on TV and on several radio shows. They were heavily involved in the book and the movie. So, I’m going to do something that I really hate, and give the movie theater my money to see this thing. I am almost certain I won’t be disappointed. I loved Act of Valor, American Sniper and especially Lone Survivor, and people are comparing this movie to those movies. If you’re looking for something to see this weekend, try this one.

“The State Department’s latest Freedom of Information Act release contains a disturbing email that appears to show the former Secretary of State instructing a subordinate to remove the headings from a classified document and send it to her in an unsecure manner,” he said in a statement on Friday.

“It raises a host of serious questions and underscores the importance of the various inquiries into the transmittal of classified information through her non-government email server,” he added.

[…]The Democratic primary front-runner is under investigation by the FBI for using a private email server during her tenure at State.

Republicans have accused Clinton of compromising classified data and putting national security at risk by using a non-governmental device to transmit and receive her emails.

The State Department released a new batch of 3,007 emails on Friday, in which it said 66 were classified. The total number of classified messages received from Clinton’s server is now up to 1,340.

As Hillary herself has personally attested — is that none of the sensitive material that she wrongfully transmitted through her unsecure server was “marked classified” at the time. Again, this is meaningless, especially when it comes to highly secret material that she was obligated to recognize and protect as soon as it was produced. But the email chain referenced above includes an instruction from Hillary Clinton to a State Department aide (who now works on her campaign) to strip classified information — it remains redacted to this day — of its classified markings [“identifying heading”] and “send nonsecure.”

Which leads us to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Has the State Department released a smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal? In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.

That should be game, set, and match, yes?

“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” That’s an order to violate the laws handling classified material. There is no other way to read that demand.

Game, set, match, indeed. Every single one of Hillary’s excuses has now evaporated, and this email is a clear instance of giving an order in violation of national security clearance rules.

Hillary Clinton, I don’t need to hasten to add, belongs in jail.

She really does have contempt for rules and regulations that are devised by experts for the good of her country. She does not understand things like encryption and information security. She does not respect the need for national security. She is not qualified to be President. Her only reason for wanting to be President is personal ambition, not the good of her country.

I doubt that she could even survive on her own in this world, without her army of government handlers and assistants driving her around, buying her groceries and showing her how to operate the hardware and software that any teenager can operate. She just hasn’t had the experience needed to be President – she doesn’t know how to do the job. Running around the world trying to push abortion and gay rights on other countries is not good experience for the job.

She needs to retire with her charming husband Bill and talk about the good old days when she was protecting him from the women he assaulted and abused. If she refuses to take responsibility for the terrible harm that she’s done to her country, then maybe she needs to spend the rest of her life in a federal prison.

POMPEO: “Do you know how many security requests there were in the 1st quarter of 2012?”

CLINTON: “For everyone or for Benghazi?”

POMPEO: “I’m sorry, yes ma’am. Related to Benghazi and Libya. Do you know how many there were?”

CLINTON: “No.”

POMPEO: “Ma’am, there were just over 100 plus. In the 2nd quarter, do you know how many there were?”

CLINTON: “No, I do not.”

POMPEO: “Ma’am there were 172ish – might have been 171 or 173. … How many were there in July and August and then in that week and few days before the attacks? Do you know?”

CLINTON: “There were a number of them. I know that.”

POMPEO: “Yes, ma’am – 83 by our count. That’s over 600 requests. You’ve testified this morning that you’ve had none of those reach your desk. Is that correct also?”

CLINTON: “That’s correct.”

POMPEO: “Madam Secretary, Mr. Blumenthal wrote you 150 emails. It appears from the materials that we’ve read that all of those reached your desk.

“Can you tell us why security requests from your professionals, the men that you just testified … are incredibly professional, incredibly capable people, trained in the art of keeping us all safe, none of those made it to you, but a man who was a friend of yours, who’d never been to Libya, didn’t know much about it – at least that’s his testimony – didn’t know much about it, every one of those reports that he sent on to you that had to do with situations on the ground in Libya, those made it to your desk?

“You asked for more of them. You read them. You corresponded with him, and yet the folks that worked for you didn’t have the same courtesy.”

On the night of the attack, Jordan said, Clinton had a phone call with the president of Libya where she told him Ansar al-Sharia was claiming responsibility.

The next day, Jordan said, Clinton told the Egyptian prime minister something “significant,” where she acknowledged they knew the attack in Libya had nothing to do with any video.

“We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film,” Jordan read out from Clinton’s email. “It was a planned attack. Not a protest. Let me read that one more time. We know, not we think, not it might be, we know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with a film. It was a planned attack. Not a protest. State Department experts knew the truth. You knew the truth, but that’s not what the American people got. Again, the American people want to know why. Why didn’t you tell the American people exactly what you told the Egyptian prime minister?”

[…]Jordan showed with other emails that her top staffers were already discussing the political ramifications of the attack and how to respond. He said Clinton picked the option of a “video narrative” “with no evidence” because she wanted the Libya situation to be a key success story for the Obama administration.

“You did it because Libya was supposed to be this great success story for the Obama White House and the Clinton State Department, and a key campaign theme that year was GM’s alive, bin Laden’s dead, al-Qaeda’s on the run,” Jordan said. “Now you have a terrorist attack, and it’s a terrorist attack in Libya and it’s just 56 days before an election. You can live with the protest about a video. That won’t hurt you, but a terrorist attack will. So you can’t be square with the American people.”

Full recording (10 minutes):

Now, you will hear a lot in the mainstream media that Hillary Clinton took no damage and did a great job in the hearings. But that is a lie. And I’m going to cite Chuck Todd to explain what really happened in the hearings:

NBC’s Chuck Todd said former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “has no good answers” to offer Thursday on the Libya policy she was part of in the Obama administration when she testifies before the Benghazi Select Committee.

[…]“There’s two tough things that she has to deal with,” Todd said. “One is for 15 years, the State Department was told it had to improve embassy security. 15 years. This is four secretaries of state, and she along with three other secretaries of state didn’t do that. And second, it’s about Libya and the decision to go into Libya. That’s where she has no good answers.”

So two points. First, the State Department refused to respond to 600+ requests for additional security leading up to the attack. And even more important, Hillary Clinton told multiple people that the attack was a terrorist attack, days before she came out and said that the attack was a spontaneous demonstration caused by “an Internet video”. She told this to the family of the victims, when she knew that the truth was different. Why is this woman leading the Democrat primary? Do Democrat voters not pay attention to national security and foreign policy?

UPDATE: Stephen Hayes has a Weekly Standard podcast episode to comment on the hearings.